A Young Girl's Allegory Helps Others Surface From Grief

October 24, 1999|By Veronique Mistiaen. Special to the Tribune.

LONDON — Claire and Sarah were two freckled dolphins who lived happily in the sea near the coast of Ireland. They fished and played together and were best friends. Then one day, Claire, the eldest, got caught in a fishing net and disappeared forever.

Like her alter ego in the dolphins story, Sarah Fitzgerald saw her world shatter when her elder sister Claire died in a road crash six years ago.

During the ensuing years, however, Sarah, now 14, was able to transform her intense feelings of anger and despair into a moving book about the life of two dolphins: an allegory on how she coped with her sister's death and managed to be happy again.

The book was meant as a private exercise -- Sarah's way to express her feelings and distance herself from the pain -- but it ended up being published and is now helping bereaved children around the world. The book, called "The Tale of Two Dolphins (When my sister died suddenly)," also has inspired Sarah's parents to create the Bramble's Trust, a non-profit organization working with bereaved families, particularly children.

Claire was 5 years older than Sarah. She played the clarinet and the violin and wanted to work in family law. She had a beautiful smile and freckles like her little sister. She was "funny, very clever and a bit bossy -- the greatest sister in the world," says Sarah sitting with her parents, Steve and Liz, in the family living room in Bewdley, Worcestershire.

On Nov. 18, 1993, returning from a school musical outing in London, Claire was killed along with 11 schoolmates and their teacher when their minibus crashed into a truck on the freeway. She was just 13. For her family, the world suddenly ceased to be a happy place.

"At first I just didn't take it in," says Sarah, who was 8 at the time. "I watched lots of videos. It was very unreal."

Her school offered counseling in the weeks following the accident, but she felt too numb to attend. When the numbness dissipated, the counselors were long gone.

Overnight the little girl had become an only child. She felt desperately lonely.

"I cried a lot. I hit pillows because I felt so angry," Sarah says.

At night, she dreaded going to bed.

When Phil Smith, a counselor with Acorns Children's Hospice in Birmingham, came to visit her at home, Sarah mentioned she had thought about writing a book "to get her feelings out." Smith was encouraging, and soon every Monday after school, the pair would sit for half an hour in the Fitzgeralds' living room, talking and working on the book.

"I never really planned it. It just came out," Sarah says. She chose dolphins because she couldn't bear to write directly about her sister, and they both loved dolphins.

In the story, after Claire was killed, the little dolphin kept to herself and didn't want to play.

"She kept thinking about Claire and the way things used to be," Sarah wrote in her book.

Smith and Sarah worked on the book for a couple of years, and slowly Sarah felt more peaceful.

"I don't think it showed, but writing the book helped me," Sarah says.

Her mother remembers it did: "You were able to sleep better and were more able to have friends around."

Only when the book was finished did Sarah show it to her parents.

"I thought it was wonderful," her father says. "I was in tears when I read it."

And her mother, a head nurse specializing in bereavement, adds: "I was taken aback by the fact that Sarah had illustrated bereavement so clearly -- all the steps in the process -- better than professionals."

They showed the notebook to a family friend, Elizabeth Capewell, director of the Centre for Crisis Management and Education in Newbury, Berkshire, an organization helping victims of major disasters and their families.

Capewell was so impressed, she asked to borrow the book. Shortly afterward, she visited bomb victims in Omagh, Northern Ireland, and handed Sarah's book to social workers and teachers who were struggling to help the bereaved. "They were very grateful. There are very few resources on sudden death in this country. There has been a desperate need for a book like this." She urged Sarah to publish it.

Sarah could see her point.

"Adults sometimes don't listen," she says. "They do stuff in a different way." The book, she adds, shows "how you can be happy a long time after something terrible has happened, but still sad at the same time. I've got loads of letters from children saying: `This is exactly how I felt.' "

Sarah asked Claire's close friend Kate Galle to illustrate the story.

"It was nice to do something for Claire," Kate says. "The story was so true."

Sarah wanted the book published for Claire's 18 birthday last September, so Worcester County Council printed the first 1,000 copies free of charge and the family distributed them to local schools, where many friends of the 12 children and their teacher were.